


onboro

by shoujo_doll



Category: The Caligula Effect (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-10 22:27:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18417128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoujo_doll/pseuds/shoujo_doll
Summary: Kurumi Yumino dreams of a gate. It seems to be the easy way out.





	onboro

**Author's Note:**

> Just something short I wrote for my job, inspired by my favorite Kuchinashi.

I want to pass through the gate. I see it in my dreams, when I drift to sleep and think of them. It’s so inviting. So warm and smoky like a funeral pyre, yet cold and fresh like the sleeping pills in my bottle. At the end of the world, of all things, there it stands, and I approach.

Their hands reach from the gate, to do what, I can’t tell. But I can feel them from a distance. I can feel something, anything, and that is what drives me. I want to feel again.

 

I walk forward, and wake up in a bed.

 

I look around the room, not my room anymore, but a room, through the flowing water. Water. Perhaps water could have been there a few years ago. A deluge could have killed the flames, and stopped them from torching the room I lie in now. Perhaps it could have saved them. But that’s a mere hypothetical. The flames have burned, the wood has crackled and died. Nothing goes back, not for me or anyone else.

I put on my mask and stand up. Without my mask, I can’t speak. With it, I can’t sleep. I was never truly complete after the fire cleared, after all. I walk through the door, and for a moment I wish it was the gate. Yet it isn’t. Nothing is what I want it to be, because in a world without them everything is nothing and vice versa. 

Soon, I’m in the street, and husks pass by me. Soulless drones and broken dreams. Yet they have something. What am I to them? A whimpering dog with a mask for a mouth? I ignore them and continue walking.

I don’t remember what happens next, but then I’m back home. Everything preceding this is just as irrelevant as everything after. I know why it is, and I can’t change it, because such a thing is humanly impossible, but I want to change it anyway, because such a thing is human instinct.

 

I drift to sleep.

 

I wake up in another world. A lady in white stands at the gate, this time. She extends her hand, with promises of salvation, of paradise and happiness. I take it. I can feel their hands in mine too. But they aren’t warm. I don’t mind anymore. I’ve made my choice, I know what I want. She knows what I want, and I am grateful for it, because finally, finally someone understands. 

 

I finally enter the gate.

 

I walk forward, and wake up in a room. A small room, but one with friends. In front of me is the technological key to my own soul, the power to _scream_ and show the world who I am. The lady in white smiles and gestures to it. My voice returns to me.

And with that, I begin to compose. I take the fire that burned my world to ash and ruin, and I control it, weaponise it into a song. A thrashing, harsh song, a song of screams of hate mixed with pleas of desperation and tears of loss, a song with loud, ambiguous noises that bounce around chaotically as if they were a wild fire, torching down a field of gardenias.

It’s a song that is me. But not a song that is them.


End file.
